HIGHLY INTEGRATED MEDIA ACCESS CONTROL

摘要

A supervisory communications device (106), such as a headend device within a cable communications network, monitors and controls communications with a plurality of remote communications devices, such as cable modems, throughout a widely distributed network. The supervisory device allocates bandwidth on the upstream channels by sending MAP messages over its downstream channel. A highly integrated media access controller integrated circuit (MAC IC) (112) operates within the headend to provide lower level DOCSIS Processing on signals exchanged with the remote devices. The enhanced fucntionality of the MAC IC relieves the processing burden on the headend CPU and increases packet throughput. The enhanced functionality includes header suppression and expansion, DES encryption and decryption, fragment reassembly, concatenaton and DMA operations.